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]]>Theresa May to Resign as U.K. Prime Minister: Live Updateshttps://irawe.com/theresa-may-to-resign-as-u-k-prime-minister-live-updates/
Fri, 24 May 2019 16:05:55 +0000https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/world/europe/theresa-may-resignation.html

Here’s what happens next:

Video

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in London on Friday. Mrs. May plans to step down as the leader of the Conservative Party on June 7.CreditCreditSimon Dawson/Reuters

Mrs. May is leaving Downing Street, but not today.

Facing a cabinet rebellion, Theresa May set out Friday morning a timetable for her departure from office.

Standing in front of 10 Downing Street, Mrs. May said it was in the “best interests of the country for a new prime minister” to lead Britain through the Brexit process. She announced plans to step down as the leader of the Conservative Party on June 7, with the process to replace her beginning the following week. She will remain as a lame-duck prime minister until a new leader is chosen, probably by the end of July.

“I feel as certain today as I did three years ago that in a democracy, if you give people a choice you have a duty to implement what they decide. I have done my best to do that,” she added. “I have done everything I can to convince M.P.s to back that deal. Sadly, I have not been able to do so.”

Mrs. May’s voice cracked as she said she was honored to serve the country as the “second female prime minister, but certainly not the last,” and said the role had been the honor of her life.

The speech followed a meeting with Graham Brady, a powerful leader of backbench Conservative lawmakers.

She will continue as a member of Parliament after stepping down as prime minister, the Press Association news agency has reported.

Image

The European Parliament in Brussels. Leaders of the bloc remain committed to the withdrawal agreement that Mrs. May negotiated.CreditYves Herman/Reuters

In Brussels, the Brexit equation is unchanged.

European Union officials worry about what comes next, but they insisted that their position on Brexit would not budge. The bloc’s leaders did not want Britain to leave, but they remain committed to the withdrawal agreement Mrs. May negotiated, even if the next prime minister is a hard-line Brexiteer who tries to drive a harder bargain.

“We are ready, we have been ready, we continue to be ready whatever the scenario is,” said Mina Andreeva, a European Commission spokeswoman. But, she added, the commission would prefer “an orderly withdrawal on the basis of the withdrawal agreement that has been negotiated with the U.K.”

The view from Brussels is that the choices remain the negotiated deal, an economically damaging “cliff edge” Brexit without a deal, or no Brexit at all.

A spokeswoman for the Spanish government called Mrs. May’s resignation “bad news” because it makes a no-deal Brexit more likely.

In Paris, the German ambassador to France, Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut, speaking at an event hosted by the American University of Paris, noted the resignation of Mrs. May and said that Germany was always willing to give the British more time to sort out the Brexit impasse.

But even with Mrs. May’s resignation, he said, Brexit and its dilemmas remained. “Brexit yes or no,’’ he said. “But more important is, Brexit how? Every how has a price. And the British begin to understand how high is the price.”

Boris Johnson, the hard-line Brexit supporter and former foreign secretary, is one of the candidates to replace Mrs. May.CreditNeil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock

The succession race is well underway.

Conservative lawmakers have been positioning themselves for a leadership contest for months. Several were already campaigning actively before Mrs. May announced her decision to resign.

Candidates for party leadership have to be nominated by two other members of Parliament, though if there is only one candidate, he or she automatically becomes the new leader. If more than two candidates emerge, lawmakers vote among themselves to narrow the field and then put two candidates to a vote by all Conservative Party members, who number approximately 120,000.

The Conservative Party chairman, Brandon Lewis, said in a statement on Friday that lawmakers would begin their voting process on June 10, and that the new leader would be in place before Parliament’s summer break, which usually begins in late July.

Hard-line Brexit supporters will be determined to replace Mrs. May with someone from their ranks. The former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson; the former Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab; and Andrea Leadsom, who left her cabinet post as leader of the House of Commons on Wednesday, are seen as likely contenders.

But less ideological figures are likely to put themselves forward, too, including Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, and Sajid Javid, the home secretary.

A rally in London in March calling for a public vote on the government’s final Brexit deal.CreditDan Kitwood/Getty Images

The departure process starts after Trump’s June visit ends.

Conservative lawmakers have been deeply frustrated by Mrs. May’s failure to deliver on Brexit, which became the government’s central — some would say its sole — preoccupation after the country voted to leave the union in a 2016 referendum.

But the breaking point has come at an awkward moment, with President Trump scheduled to arrive in Britain on June 3 for a state visit and to take part in events to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings that preceded the end of World War II.

Mr. Trump and Mrs. May are to meet at 10 Downing Street on June 4, according to a schedule released by Buckingham Palace. Mr. Trump is also to attend a state banquet at Buckingham Palace, hosted by the queen.

Mrs. May’s ability to soak up political punishment and plow on regardless won her admiration, even from some of her many critics. But the pressure on her increased after disastrous local election results this month, when the Conservatives lost more than 1,300 seats in municipalities around the country.

Then, the government announced that Britain would, after all, take part in elections to the European Parliament this week — another symbol of Mrs. May’s failure to achieve a withdrawal. Britons voted on Thursday, but the results will be announced on Sunday, after all the European Union countries have gone to the polls. They are expected to be catastrophic for the Conservatives.

A mural in the South London area of Brixton, which became home to many West Indian immigrants after World War II.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

Mrs. May’s speech upset immigration advocates and firefighters.

Even in her departure speech, Mrs. May drew ire from some in the country who saw her language as insulting.

She recalled that he had pulled her aside at a local event and extolled the value of compromise, advice she said she worried lawmakers had forgotten. Some analysts hailed the line as a powerful, if belated, pitch for an elusive compromise.

But immigration advocates saw that as a shameless attempt to use Mr. Winton’s legacy by a prime minister who had made anti-migrant policies a centerpiece of her political career.

“Theresa May did everything in her power to keep vulnerable refugees out of the U.K. and introduced the hostile environment. Makes me livid,” Colin Yeo, an immigration lawyer, wrote on Twitter.

Mrs. May was previously Britain’s home secretary, and implemented a “hostile environment” policy that obliged businesses and private landlords, as well as public officials, to check the immigration papers of job applicants, renters, medical patients, banking customers and more. It gave rise to the Windrush scandal, in which people from Caribbean countries were wrongly denied rights or deported from Britain.

Then, Mrs. May pointed to her government’s response to the Grenfell fire disaster that left some 72 people dead as a proud part of her legacy. The Fire Brigades Union issued a statement that called Mrs. May’s comment “disgraceful.”

“Many of the underlying issues at Grenfell were due to unsafe conditions that had been allowed to fester under Tory governments and a council for which Theresa May bears ultimate responsibility,” the statement read.

Canary Wharf, one of London’s financial hubs.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

British business is preparing for more uncertainty.

Britain has taken several economic hits recently, and business leaders are worried about the prospect of more gridlock in Parliament, potentially leading to a harmful “no deal” Brexit on Oct. 31.

“There are only five months before Britain crashes out of the E.U. without a deal, causing prices to rise and reducing the availability of many goods on the shelves,” Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, said in a statement.

British Steel, the country’s second-biggest steel company, collapsed into insolvency this week and said Brexit was partly to blame. The travel company Thomas Cook reported massive losses, saying Brexit had held travelers back from booking trips.

For months, retailers stockpiled goods ahead of previous Brexit deadlines for fear that traffic jams and issues at the border would prevent food from getting into the country. Britain imports about half its food from or via the European Union.

Throughout Mrs. May’s protracted fall, Conservative lawmakers were eager to avoid being seen as the proverbial “men in gray suits” ushering out Britain’s second female prime minister, even as they worked hard behind the scenes to do just that.

The party suffered after being seen to humiliate Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, when she was forced out in 1990. But in the days before Mrs. May announced her resignation plans, the echoes were hard to avoid.

Lawmakers raised the prospect of Mrs. May’s husband, Philip, intervening, much as Ms. Thatcher’s husband, Denis, was famously said to have urged her to stand down.

Iain Duncan Smith, a prominent Brexiteer and former Conservative party leader, said in a radio interview about Mrs. May: “The only person closest to her is clearly her husband, and I think somebody has to say, ‘Look, nobody likes this.’”

A British tabloid, Metro, played up those appeals with the headline, “Just Tell Her Phil.”

Dominic Raab, the former Brexit secretary who would like to take Mrs. May’s place, described her statement as “dignified.”CreditSimon Dawson/Reuters

Tributes flowed from those who tried to oust her.

It has been a long time since so many prominent political figures had nice things to say about Mrs. May.

Compliments poured in from opposition lawmakers who have tried to oust her, and from fellow Conservatives who have undermined her and hope to take her place. Some were backhanded, some barbed, and still others gave no hint of the history of animosity behind them.

“Thank you for your stoical service to our country and the Conservative Party,” tweeted Mr. Johnson, who quit Mrs. May’s cabinet over Brexit and who has never concealed his ambition to be prime minister.

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party, retweeted Mr. Johnson with the comment, “What a hypocrite.”

Two other Conservatives who quit Mrs. May’s cabinet over Brexit and would like to take her place, Mr. Raab and Ms. Leadsom, described her statement as “dignified.”

The statement from Tom Watson, deputy leader of the opposition Labour Party, was no bouquet, saying that Mrs. May “had an unenviably difficult job, and she did it badly.” But even he added, “she tried to do what was right for our country,” and was “honorable in her intentions.”

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, dispensed with any pretense of a tribute. “She’s now accepted what the country’s known for months: She can’t govern, and nor can her divided and disintegrating party.”

But few politicians could put themselves in her place as completely as her immediate predecessor, David Cameron, whose own six-year premiership was torpedoed three years ago — also by Brexit.

“I know what it feels like when you come to realize your leadership time has finished, that the country needs a new leader, and it’s extremely difficult and painful to step outside Downing Street and say those things,” he told reporters on Friday, standing on a picturesque country road, amid waving grasses.

One could also argue that Mr. Cameron left the problem in her lap: He is the one who promised to hold the Brexit referendum, a monumental gamble he made to placate the Euroskeptic wing of his party.

]]>Trump appeals ruling allowing banks to hand his financial records to Congresshttps://irawe.com/trump-appeals-ruling-allowing-banks-to-hand-his-financial-records-to-congress/
Fri, 24 May 2019 16:02:29 +0000https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-banks/trump-appeals-ruling-allowing-banks-to-hand-his-financial-records-to-congress-idUSKCN1SU1US?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNewsNEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump, three of his children and the Trump Organization on Friday appealed a court order allowing Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp to hand their financial records over to Democratic lawmakers.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on a range of issues during an event devoted to “America’s farmers and ranchers” in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, U.S., May 23, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

They are asking the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan to overrule U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos, who on Wednesday refused to block the banks from responding to subpoenas issued last month by two U.S. House of Representatives committees.

“We remain committed to providing appropriate information to all authorized investigations and will abide by a court order regarding such investigations,” Deutsche Bank spokeswoman Kerrie McHugh said in an emailed statement.

Capital One, the House Financial Services Committee and House Intelligence Committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The committees have agreed not to enforce the subpoenas for seven days after Wednesday’s ruling.

The Republican president, who is seeking re-election next year, has aggressively sought to defy congressional oversight of his administration since Democrats took control of the House in January.

Some parts of the subpoenas have been included in court filings. The subpoena on Deutsche Bank, issued by both committees, seeks extensive records of accounts, transactions and investments linked to Trump, his three oldest children, their immediate family members and several Trump Organization entities, as well as records of ties they might have to foreign entities.

Deutsche Bank has long been a principal lender for Trump’s real estate business and a 2017 disclosure form showed that Trump had at least $130 million of liabilities to the bank.

In March, before issuing their subpoena, Democratic lawmakers asked Capital One for documents concerning potential conflicts of interest tied to Trump’s Washington hotel and other business interests since he became president in January 2017.

In asking Ramos to block the subpoenas on Wednesday, a lawyer for the Trumps argued that they exceeded the authority of Congress and were “the epitome of an inquiry into private or personal matters.”

Ramos, however, found that they were allowed under the broad authority of Congress to conduct investigations to further legislation.

Ramos’ ruling came just two days after a federal judge in Washington ruled against the president in a similar case, finding that Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars LLP, must comply with a congressional subpoena for Trump’s financial records.

]]>Author Correction: miR-34a blocks osteoporosis and bone metastasis by inhibiting osteoclastogenesis and Tgif2https://irawe.com/author-correction-mir-34a-blocks-osteoporosis-and-bone-metastasis-by-inhibiting-osteoclastogenesis-and-tgif2/
Fri, 24 May 2019 16:00:00 +0000https://irawe.com/author-correction-mir-34a-blocks-osteoporosis-and-bone-metastasis-by-inhibiting-osteoclastogenesis-and-tgif2/In this Letter, the citation to ‘Fig. 4e, f’ should be ‘Fig. 3e, f’ following the text: “Consequently, OVX-induced bone loss was attenuated by miR-34a-CH”. This does not affect the conclusions of the paper, and the original Letter has not been corrected online.

]]>Midwest Tornadoes: Why It’s So Hard to Predict Where a Twister Will Strikehttps://irawe.com/midwest-tornadoes-why-its-so-hard-to-predict-where-a-twister-will-strike/
Fri, 24 May 2019 14:48:03 +0000http://5ce426b024c8914a9a895f3c

Editor’s note: This is a developing story about severe weather in the Midwest. We will update it as more information becomes available.

This week brings atmospheric devastation to the Midwest: nearly 200 tornadoes have torn through the region since last Friday, including Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri, on Wednesday night. All told, the disasters have left at least three dead and 25 injured. The damage appears to be extensive, as the flurry of storms cut a line from Texas all the way up through Maryland, with one twister touching down near Washington DC. Officials are still taking toll.

In an ideal world, meteorologists would be able to predict when and where a tornado is going to form, as they do with rainstorms, to mobilize emergency services and give people warning. But they face a couple problems. For one, scientists know how tornadoes form, but they’re still grappling with the monumentally complex physics at play: A tornado is essentially a swirling funnel of data you can’t get anywhere near. And two, to run models that crunch all that data, you need a hell of a lot of computing power. But in this era of ever more powerful supercomputers, researchers are getting more adept at using what data they have to understand and predict tornadoes.

First, a quick primer on how tornadoes form. They begin with wind shear, or winds moving in different directions on top of each other. In the Midwest, this comes from two opposing layers of air: On the bottom is moist air coming off the Gulf of Mexico; on the top is dry wind associated with the jet stream, blowing in from the west.

“Pretend you’ve got a bunch of invisible ferris wheels in the air,” says David Gold, chief meteorologist for Global Business Services at IBM, which is rolling out a new forecasting system this year. “If the winds at the top of the ferris wheel are blowing from the west, and the winds at the bottom of the ferris wheel are calm, the ferris wheel will spin.”

The next ingredient is a thunderstorm. This system takes the spinning ferris wheels and tilts them on their side. Now you’ve got rotation, which consumes the thunderstorm, transforming it into a tornado.

“Because of the geography and the unique juxtaposition of all those different air masses, they readily come together very frequently during the spring,” says Gold. “That’s why the Great Plains is a hotspot for tornados.”

To predict when and where a tornado might touch town, scientists have a range of tools at their disposal—they can measure wind speed and pressure through weather stations and watch doppler radar, for instance. Forecasters can then dispatch storm-chasing researchers to gather much-needed data should a tornado materialize. But tornadoes can be fleeting—most last for less than 10 minutes. And they’re relatively small and fast, at least compared to a slow-moving hurricane, which meteorologists can monitor over the long term using satellites. A tornado seemingly comes out of nowhere, making it difficult to alert the public of the threat.

“You’re never going to do it perfectly,” says Gold. “There’s always going to be measurement errors, we’re always going to have gaps. So there’s going to be a lot of holes, if you will, in our estimate.”

One massive gap is the fact that a tornado is a highly vertical phenomenon. “Near the surface we have pretty dense observation networks, but above the surface the density goes way down,” says Adam Clark, a research meteorologist with the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory. “So we launch these weather balloons, and that measures temperature and dew point and wind as you go up into the troposphere, but those are spaced at really large distances from one another.” We’re talking maybe 100 sites across the entire country.

So instead of targeting tornadoes, researchers can look at a key component of them: supercells, which are thunderstorms with rotating updrafts. These storms tend to be long-lived, and are associated with a majority of severe weather in the US, as well as with extremely violent tornadoes. “If you can predict supercells, that’s basically a way of predicting where severe weather is going to happen, to a very large extent,” says David Stensrud, a meteorologist at Penn State University. Meteorologists can now predict where these tornado-birthing supercells may emerge, at a resolution of about 3 kilometers.

At IBM, which bought The Weather Company in 2015, a new system known as GRAF will focus on getting supercell thunderstorms right. Once live, it’ll produce global forecasts about 12 hours into the future. “This is crucial timing for predicting the occurrence of thunderstorms—and especially for identifying whether thunderstorms are likely to rotate and potentially generate tornadoes,” says Todd Hutchinson, IBM GRAF lead at The Weather Company.

Other researchers are tackling tornado modeling head-on, calculating such phenomena as how air moves at increasingly dense points in space. At the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin, executive director Dan Stanzione uses his center’s Stampede2 supercomputer to chew through massive simulations. Every night during tornado season, the supercomputer runs forecasts to predict where tornadoes might form the next day, so storm chasers can be dispatched to gather more data about tornado dynamics on the ground, and therefore further refine tornado forecasting.

“We’re throwing several quadrillion operations per second at it for six or seven hours,” says Stanzione. Between 15,000 and 18,000 processor cores are working at the same time, which is astounding but still a fraction of the supercomputer’s 350,000 total cores. (Various experiments can run in parallel.)

Still, the lack of data on various tornado attributes, especially higher in the atmosphere where only a few weather balloons and data-gathering aircraft might pass, means forecasts hinge heavily on their modelers’ assumptions. “That’s why in hurricane forecasting they actually show you the tracks on TV—the storm could go here or here or here,” says Stanzione. “Those are all the same software model but they’re slightly different initial conditions.” Same goes for modeling tornadoes.

As the machines and the underlying algorithms grow more powerful, they produce better predictions, which means storm-chasing researchers are more likely to go to the right place at the right time to collect better data, which goes right back into the system.

Yet another complicating factor here, though, is climate change. Might a warming world already be supercharging tornadoes, as it is doing to hurricanes? Answering that question requires gathering a large sample of tornadoes past and present. On one hand, climate change might actually cause wind shear to decrease, and therefore neuter a key ingredient of tornadoes. But a warmer environment might also have stronger updrafts, which would help tilt those spinning atmospheric ferris wheels.

“So looking at climate change and severe weather is a lot harder question than looking at climate change with respect to a lot of other weather events, where I think the linkages are much more clear,” says Stensrud.

Either way, meteorologists’ predictive powers are growing, thanks to burly computers and mountains of data. Tornadoes may be confounding, but they’re not altogether impenetrable.

More Great WIRED Stories

]]>Shedding light on the burden of dengue in Bangladeshhttps://irawe.com/shedding-light-on-the-burden-of-dengue-in-bangladesh/
Fri, 24 May 2019 14:27:59 +0000https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190524102759.htmDengue, also known as dengue fever, is a viral disease transmitted to humans by mosquitoes of the genus Aedes. The incidence of dengue is currently increasing dramatically, and it is now one of the diseases said to be re-emerging. In Bangladesh, sporadic cases were reported in the 1960s and a major outbreak occurred in 2000, with clinical cases reported annually since then. However, the burden of dengue is unclear. Researchers at the Institut Pasteur have conducted a study to determine the burden of dengue in Bangladesh and identify key risk factors for infection.

Dengue virus continues to infect millions of people each year, with resource poor countries often disproportionally affected. In order to direct precious resources to tackle the virus in the most efficient way, researchers at the Institut Pasteur, in collaboration with teams at Johns Hopkins University, icddr,b and the Bangladesh Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research, wanted to know where the risk is the greatest and identify subsets of the population at increased risk. However, this is rarely known, especially in settings with limited surveillance capabilities. For example, in Bangladesh, where the study was performed, there was essentially no understanding of where dengue virus circulated outside of the capital Dhaka.

“In this context, seroprevalence studies can help. Once infected, individuals develop long-lived antibodies that can be detected by specific tests” explains Henrik Salje, head of the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases Group at the Institut Pasteur. However, seroprevalence studies are nearly only done in single places, which means their findings are unlikely to be applicable to the wider population. By contrast, in this study, the researchers visited 70 different communities from all around Bangladesh, and invited over 5,000 individuals of all ages to provide blood samples, which were tested for evidence of dengue antibodies. They also asked individuals about themselves, including their age, sex and travel history, and trapped mosquitoes.

Modeling the introduction and spread of dengue

Researchers estimated that 24% of the Bangladesh population has been infected by dengue in their lifetime. However, this ranged from 3% to villages in the north of the country to close to 90% in the large urban hubs. They used mathematical models to estimate the number of annual infections and built maps that predicted where risk was concentrated. They estimated that there was an average of 2.4 million infections each year, mainly concentrated to the cities of Dhaka, Chittagong and Khulna. Outside these urban hubs, there was still some exposure to dengue, with risk concentrated in men, who tended to travel more. The main dengue mosquito, Aedes aegypti, was mainly found in urban cities, suggesting its current absence from many rural communities acts as a barrier to broad nationwide epidemics. Had researchers visited only a small number of communities, the resulting national estimates would have been very different, highlighting the danger in extrapolating findings from just a few communities to the whole country.

“Our findings will allow public health agencies in Bangladesh to concentrate their efforts to battle dengue and also suggests that monitoring where Aedes are found will help identify populations at risk” concludes Henrik Salje. The study design and analytical approaches researchers from the Institut Pasteur implemented are easily transportable to other countries and to different pathogens.

DAVIE, Fla. — Jamaica’s consul general in South Florida held a party at his home on Wednesday night to celebrate the Reggae Girlz, the first national soccer team from the Caribbean to qualify for the Women’s World Cup.

The tables were set up around the pool and the players and their coaches were there, but every guest was asked to bring a little something extra: a donation of at least $100 to help Jamaica complete its preparations to compete at the World Cup in France next month. The tournament begins in less than two weeks, and so time, just like money, was short.

If the story of women’s soccer in recent years has been the ongoing fight for equal pay, there always has been a different inequality just below the surface. While women’s international soccer has made significant progress in some countries, support for it, especially financially, from individual federations and corporate sponsors continues to vary widely.

France, the host country for this year’s championship, has a thriving professional league, and its players have spent the last few weeks preparing for the World Cup at their federation’s national training center. The United States, the defending champion and a three-time winner of the tournament, is completing an opulent send-off tour across the country this weekend, replete with nationally-televised games on ESPN and giant billboards on big-city buildings.

Jamaica’s run-up to the World Cup, by contrast, has been much less visible, and its program’s mere existence far less financially secure. Historically, the Reggae Girlz have received tenuous support from their national federation. As recently as 2015, the federation cut off financing for the team entirely.

As a side trip on their road to France then, Jamaica’s women first detoured to South Florida, trying to raise money one contributor at a time. There was a fund-raiser and an auction of sports apparel at the consul general’s home; a pep rally at a chiropractic center; and an exhibition match on Thursday night preceded by a celebrity game featuring entertainers from Jamaica and Haiti.

Image

Bob Marley’s daughter Cedella has been a benefactor for the team.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times

Historically, the Reggae Girlz have received tenuous support from their national federation.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe team auctioned sports memorabilia to raise money.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times

But signs of the team’s struggles weren’t hard to find. At Wednesday’s party, the coaching staff wore shirts meant for the men’s national team, andused markers to scratch out that team’s nickname — “Reggae Boyz” — on the sleeves. Some Jamaican players still must buy their own cleats. And when the women’s team qualified for the World Cup last October outside of Dallas, several coaches went to Costco and paid out of their pockets for jackets so their players could train in the chilly, rainy weather.

No high-ranking official from the Jamaican federation was present to celebrate that momentous qualification in a penalty shootout against Panama, the team’s coaches said.

“Their attitude has been pretty poor,” goalkeeper Nicole McClure, 29, said of the Jamaican soccer federation. “We’ve always been an afterthought, and we’re still fighting for equality. We want a seat at the table. It’s been quite frustrating.”

In March, McClure, who grew up in Queens, held her own fund-raiser. She plays without compensation on a club team in Northern Ireland, and she needed money to pay for food, toiletries, a bus ticket, checked baggage for a flight and some soccer gear. Her needs were not uncommon for her team.

Yet she and her teammates — and Jamaica’s coaches — acknowledged this week that things are improving, at least for the moment. Jamaica’s World Cup players have signed a contract with the federation that will pay them $800 to $1,200 a month, retroactive to January, Coach Hue Menzies said. And Menzies, who has been working free since 2015, is to receive $40,000, he said. According to team officials, this is the first time a Caribbean women’s team has signed contracts with its national federation.

“We haven’t been paid,” Menzies said with a laugh. “But we signed a contract.”

Michael Ricketts, the president of Jamaica’s soccer federation, said that criticism of the organization had been “grossly unfair.” The federation has spent about $4 million on the women’s team since it began qualifying for the World Cup, he said. Costs to hold a weeklong training camp can run to $100,000, Ricketts said, and it has been a struggle to get spectators and corporate sponsors to embrace the team. Even so, he said, a women’s league in Jamaica has been restarted on a limited basis, as well as a youth program for players under 15.

Instead, coaches and players widely credit a different benefactor, Cedella Marley, for resurrecting the women’s team with help from the Bob Marley Foundation, which is named after her musician father. Cedella Marley, angered by the sorry state of the program, was the one who spearheaded an international fund-raising effort to revive it several years ago, and she was the one who convinced Menzies, who runs a prominent youth soccer club near Orlando, Fla., to become its coach.

Without Marley, McClure said, “There would be no Reggae Girlz.”

The Alacran Foundation, a philanthropic organization, also has become a benefactor of the team. And the Reggae Girlz Foundation, a nonprofit, is raising money for such things as medical equipment to help Jamaica prepare and compete at the World Cup, but also to support the team in coming Olympic qualifying and youth national team campaigns.

Fans awaited the exhibition between the Reggae Girlz and F.C. Surge USA in Florida.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times

Khadija Shaw, right, known as Bunny, maintained her career despite the deaths of three brothers in gang-related violence in Jamaica.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York TimesFans celebrated a Jamaican goal in Florida.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times

Money remained tight, though, as the team departed Friday for Europe, where it will play a warm-up match in Scotland before continuing on to France. Even after an initial payment of $480,000 from FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, for qualifying for the World Cup, and another payment of at least $750,000 to follow, Jamaica’s buildup to the tournament has faced about a $400,000 shortfall to cover costs of training camps, travel and practice matches, according to Lisa Quarrie, the vice president of the Reggae Girlz Foundation.

Long-term, the foundation is seeking to sustain women’s soccer in Jamaica by creating an academy, building an extensive youth development system and persuading men’s teams in the National Premier League, the country’s top division, to also sponsor women’s teams.

But first things first. The World Cup starts in two weeks, and no donation is considered too small, be it a $10 ticket to Thursday night’s celebrity match or a $25 contribution on the website of the Reggae Girlz Foundation.

“They need money all the way around,” Quarrie said. “We’re going to the World Cup on the fly.”

Women’s international soccer has long faced a Sisyphean battle to gain respect and support. The American women’s team continues to find it necessary to sue U.S. Soccer for gender discrimination. Players in Australia and elsewhere have refused to play matches, and stars in other countries went public with complaints on everything from training pay to a lack of games.

It has been a particularly tough slog in the Caribbean, where soccer has been blighted by corruption, and the women’s game especially has been widely dismissed. When Trinidad and Tobago arrived in Dallas for the final qualifying round of the 2015 Women’s World Cup, its coach, Randy Waldrum, sent out a financial S.O.S. via Twitter.

“I need HELP!” Waldrum wrote at the time. “T&T sent a team here last night with $500 total. No equipment such as balls, no transportation from airport to hotel, nothing.”

Haiti’s women’s team also attempted, just as futilely, to qualify for the 2015 World Cup, relying on benefactors at an extended training camp in South Bend, Ind. Its players and coach received no salary, and the team tried to make ends meet by selling rotisserie chickens and T-shirts, and holding clinics for churches and schools.

In Jamaica, soccer has been considered by many to be too rough of a sport for women and not sufficiently feminine. Players and officials hope that this summer’s World Cup appearance will help overcome the cultural stereotype, and that women’s soccer will be elevated at home in the way track and field became appreciated with the success of the sprinter Merlene Ottey, who won nine Olympic medals between 1980 and 2000.

The Jamaican players enjoyed a victory and the support of their fans.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times

“The men have always received far more support,” said Oliver Mair, Jamaica’s consul general for the Southern United States. “So when the women qualified for the World Cup, it caught us all by surprise.”

He added: “When you start on the road, you are on your own. They had a dream, a vision. They started to do well and more people have come on board.”

For now, Menzies and his staff have countered the lack of resources inside Jamaica by helping to place top women’s players at American universities and high schools, and in leagues in the United States and Europe.

Jamaica’s star forward, Khadija Shaw, known as Bunny, attended Tennessee, where she was the Southeastern Conference’s offensive player of the year in 2018. She, perhaps more than any other player, represents the indomitable perseverance of the Reggae Girlz, having maintained her career despite the deaths of three brothersin gang-related violence in Jamaica.

Kayla McCoy, a forward and midfielder who plays for the National Women’s Soccer League’s Houston Dash, said, “I think everybody carries self-pride about how far we’ve come but also a sense of humility just because of what people have had to overcome and what people have seen and what people have had to go through.”

She added: “Nothing was handed to anybody here.”

The goal for the Reggae Girlz at the World Cup is to advance out of a forbidding group that includes Brazil, Australia and Italy. Lingering is the question of whether the Jamaican federation will provide the necessary support to keep women’s soccer growing as an international power after the tournament ends.

Asked how confident he was in the federation’s long-term commitment, Menzies, the coach, said, “Not very.”

]]>https://irawe.com/the-womens-world-cups-other-inequality-rich-vs-poor/feed/025 great games you can play on laptops and low-end PCshttps://irawe.com/25-great-games-you-can-play-on-laptops-and-low-end-pcs/
Fri, 24 May 2019 13:56:00 +0000https://irawe.com/25-great-games-you-can-play-on-laptops-and-low-end-pcs/

I called Forager ($20 on Humble) “junk food” in our review and I stand by it—but damn, it’s addictive junk food. Combining elements of survival games with idle games and even Zelda, Forager is a deft genre mashup that manages to wring a lot out of mindlessly harvesting materials and filling up various meters.

Exploration is the key, the bit that kept me coming back. There are 49 islands in Forager, each with a unique point of interest. Some have simple puzzles, others have characters to help, and a few even have dungeons complete with boss battles. You purchase islands one by one, which means there’s a steady stream of new stuff to check out—in addition to new buildings to construct, new items to craft, and so on.

Sure, it’s a mindless way to spend 15 or 20 hours, but it’s hard to deny how deep Forager sinks its hooks, and for the few days I played it I really played it.

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